Lack of choice is 'old school' in Memphis area

Mike Brown/The Commercial Appeal files
Cornerstone Preparatory School first-grade teacher Lisa Purdy works with students during the reteach/reassess time in the classroom that allows for one-on-one interaction to make sure students understand the concepts being taught during the lesson.

Brandon Dill/Special to The Commercial Appeal files
Lakeland Elementary School students in Michelle Dial's first-grade class (from left) Jeremiah Logan, Oliver Ball, Kaiden Mullins and Mason Ladd participate in a math exercise as part of the Common Core curriculum being taught at the school.

Stan Carroll/The Commercial Appeal files
Peyton Cooley, an 11th-grader, gets practical experience during metal trades class at DeSoto County Schools' Career Center on the campus of Southaven High School. Such trade and technical schools are becoming increasingly popular for students seeking a solid career foundation.

Mike Maple The Commercial Appeal files
The Centennial Commencement Ceremonies (spring commencement) for the University of Memphis awarded 2,321 degrees in two ceremonies. Malcolm Regester, 25, of Memphis wears a pair of Kanye West Shutter Shades as he received a degree in journalism with an emphasis in public relations.

Mike Brown/The Commercial Appeal files
Zariah Nolan practices her moves during a ballet class at KIPP Memphis Collegiate Middle School. KIPP Memphis is one of a growing number of charters available in Shelby County as an option for families after legislation passed in 2002 to expand the programs.

Cover for education tab, October 2012

Less than three weeks into the school year this fall, LaWanda Alston withdrew her 11-year-old son from Grizzlies Prep charter school Downtown and headed back to the city schools."I would try another charter," she said, "but my advice is look into everything. Take a day off from work and see for yourself how the school is run."

Although Alston was delighted to enroll her son in the all-boys school that is focused on college and discipline, the reality of that commitment settled in when she realized he was constantly earning demerits for behavior.

"If it looks like you are mad or unhappy, you get a turnover; turnovers are bad, buckets are good," she said.

"There's no talking in the halls. If you walk in, you would think it's a cemetery."

This is what school choice looks like in a city that fewer than 10 years ago had essentially two choices — private or public schools. For a great majority of public school parents, the price of private schools meant there really was no choice. The Catholic Jubilee Schools, underwritten by millions of dollars from an anonymous Memphian, are affordable choices for hundreds of inner-city families. An even larger public school option is presented by dozens of charter schools that have sprung up since the state charter law was approved in 2002.

The Memphis education scene is undergoing a dramatic transformation — from the controversial consolidation of Memphis and Shelby County schools to a push for municipal schools in the suburbs, from rapid growth of charter and parochial schools, to increased online instruction for home-schoolers. Even with all of this change, Memphis continues to have a large private school population; estimates are the 25 largest private schools have a combined enrollment of 20,000.

And after high school, the choices are expanding too, as colleges, trade schools and community colleges compete for students in the sluggish economy. Trade schools are tailoring their curriculums to employer needs. Colleges are following students with satellite campuses.

"We are disappointed when any student that starts with us comes to realize that Grizzlies Prep isn't for them, but at the same time, we do have high standards," said Ross Glotzbach, board chairman. "It's going to be hard for these young men to be successful if everything is easy. We still have plenty of students who are persevering, although I agree, it's very different from a lot of things they have been used to."

There are all-girls charters, all-boys charters for elementary, middle and high school students. There are charters that emphasize music, charters that emphasize math, charters that stress business and plenty where the objective is to get poor, urban students into college and beyond.

The charters are attracting national philanthropists and researchers, watching keenly to see how charters develop in Memphis.

Power Center Academy, run by Gestalt Community Schools and started five years ago in a Sunday school building at New Direction Christian Church, received $3.5 million from the Charter School Growth Fund-Tennessee this spring to help the Memphis-grown charter management organization scale up its brand.

It now serves 560 students in two schools on the New Direction campus and 150 sixth-graders in the science and arts academy it started this fall inside Gordon Elementary.

When its charter school network is fully built out, Gestalt director Derwin Sisnett expects to enroll 5,300 students in his schools, including a high school to open in the old Sears Crosstown building.

If Gestalt meets its goal, it will enroll 5 percent of the current city schools population.

"We already have a waiting list. I don't think it's going to go away, but at least we will be able to serve more scholars," Sisnett says.

Gestalt is the theory in psychology that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

As a psychology major, Sisnett saw the application at Power Center, a school that opened in the midst of the economic downturn.

School leaders figured the best way to make a long-lasting contribution was turn out students prepared to be entrepreneurs. With an assist from SunTrust, the school has a small student-run bank on campus.

A handful of students came to school with savings accounts. Now, most have them. During the Haiti earthquake, they gave $1,500 from their savings to relief efforts.

Gestalt's involvement in Gordon Elementary is part of another choice for parents committed to public schools. Through the Achievement School District, Tennessee is pouring innovation and money into the lowest 5 percent of schools.

Essentially, the ASD is the state's treatment for the bottom 5 percent of schools in the state. Of the 87 schools eligible to be under the ASD umbrella, 67 are in Memphis.

At the helm of the ASD is superintendent Chris Barbic, a tall energy-force kind of leader who tends to bound instead of walk. His biggest credential is Yes Prep, a chain of what are now 10 charter schools he started in Houston, Texas, with a single school in the late '90s as a Teach for America corpsman fresh out of Vanderbilt.

In June, 14 years later, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation awarded Yes Prep its first Broad Prize for charters, which included $250,000.

Barbic, who started working in Tennessee a year ago Aug. 1, was at the podium to receive the prize presented in Minneapolis at the national charter school conference. A week later, he took the nucleus of his ASD staff on a pilgrimage tour of Yes Prep, more than a reminder of what he intends to build in Tennessee.

"If you give any kid access to great opportunities and great resources, the kind kids in private schools have ..." Barbic said. "Any kid in this country can knock it out of the park."

The ASD work is mostly on a Memphis stage: It is directly running three schools in Frayser — Frayser Elementary, Corning Elementary and Westside Middle school — hoping that by improving the achievement of students there to automatically lift the high school, Frayser High, they will later attend.

In June, Barbic announced charter groups, including home-growns Gestalt, KIPP Memphis and Capstone Education Group, that will be his ASD partners in 2013-2014. The batch he names this winter will likely take over three more public schools in Frayser the following year as the number of schools under ASD control grows to 18.

"We're incredibly excited that these local and national charter leaders have stepped up to join the Achievement School District and serve our communities," Barbic said. "Tennessee is becoming the epicenter of educational transformation."

Memphis has a proud heritage in its private schools. The oldest, St. Agnes Academy, St. Mary's Episcopal School and Christian Brothers, started with the vision of the altruistic, many who served undaunted through yellow fever epidemics, pestilence and Civil War in their new Memphis home.

Six Dominican "foundress" nuns stepped off a flat-bottom boat on a freezing New Year's Eve in 1851 to start St. Agnes Academy, the oldest continuously operating school in West Tennessee.

Last winter, it celebrated its 160th anniversary with a Mass that rang out with song and sentimental glories for the founders.

"They were the first to establish an orphanage in 1852; it was in the attic of the school, " said Sister Marina Gibbons, president of St. Agnes from 1980 to 1995 and one of several nuns who made the trip to Memphis for the celebration from their Dominican base in St. Catharine, Ky.

"When the Civil War came, they were called to take over the hospital, even though they were teachers," Sister Marina said. "They tended to soldiers from both sides."

The American-born Dominican order (Sister Marina calls them "the All-American girls") opened St. Agnes on Feb. 4 at Orleans and Vance, more than a mile from the city center at Court Square.

"Imagine 160 years," said Joe Getz, chairman of the board. "I have had aunts and relatives here since the turn of the (19th) century," he said.

In the Internet age, the Tennessee Virtual Academy harnesses its power to let students attend school in their homes. The tax money that schools get per child flows to the virtual academy. It provides all curriculum, even computers for families who qualify.A year ago, John and Jennifer Martinez withdrew their four children from public and private Memphis schools.

They talk like evangelists about how much tuition money they are saving and the quality of education their children are receiving.

"We have one child who had problems in math," Jennifer Martinez said. "When the teacher called and asked if we wanted tutoring, I couldn't believe it.

"We used to pay $55 an hour for tutoring. This is free. Yes, we want it."

The legislature approved the Tennessee Virtual Academy in the spring of 2011. The following fall, the school's brick-and-mortar base opened in Union County in East Tennessee. The K-8 public school that beams lessons into homes across the state is part of K12 Inc., one of the two largest for-profit players in the virtual arena.

Virtual education includes a wide variety of online learning, from self-paced courses many students use to make up classes to "blended classrooms" where much of the coursework given by a teacher in a brick-and-mortar school is online.

Nationally, 250,000 students took online courses this year, up from 200,000 last year.

The format is growing fastest in traditional public schools.

In Memphis City Schools, the number of students enrolled in its online courses increased 53 percent in the last school year to 9,876.

While the majority still use online to make up failed courses, in Memphis the split between those registered for course recovery and those taking new courses has narrowed to 60-40.

"Online allows students to step into higher-level math and science courses," said Cleon Franklin, coordinator of instructional technology. "We have students taking honors geometry in the seventh grade and are very successful."

It would be hard to be a Memphian in the last few years and not notice the attention the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is receiving for its $90 million grant over seven years to improve the quality of instruction in city schools.

By making better hiring decisions, tying teacher evaluations to test scores, improving teacher pay and the school principals they work for, Gates hopes to make a difference in test scores and graduation rates in Memphis.

Much of the work MCS administrators suggested in their proposal to Gates in the summer of 2009 became part of the state's application for Race to the Top funds, the $4.35 billion in federal money the Obama administration gave to states proposing the most innovative ways to improve public education.

Tennessee and Delaware were the first states to receive the money. Tennessee is investing much of its $500 million in low-performing schools, including starting the ASD.

But its lawmakers also passed legislation to tie teacher pay to test scores, a direct borrow from the MCS Gates work, and made charter schools an option for more than just poor students in urban areas.

For the first time in MCS's 164-year history, teachers are evaluated by multiple measures every year, including how much progress their students made and what their students actually think of them as teachers.

Last spring, the first year the new teacher evaluation was in place, Memphis chose not to renew a record number of teacher contracts.

Nearly 20 percent of the district's 6,400 teachers rank either a 1 or 2, meaning they perform either "below expectations" or "significantly below expectations" on the five-point evaluation scale. According to board policy, they can be recommended for termination.

More than 30 city school teachers got termination notices this summer, and 90 more are awaiting tenure hearings as the district wrapped up the first year of an intense new evaluation process.

Teachers not invited back for cause or poor performance will be added to a state do-not-hire database for teachers, which includes teachers who may have realized they weren't meeting expectations and resigned during the year.